Stargazing
by mabelreid
Summary: One Shot Harry can't sleep. A trip to the Astronomy tower brings him in contact with a certain red haired girl Set at the end of COS


_**Authors Note: This takes place at the end of Harry's second Year. It was originally published on Sink into your Eyes under another pen name**_

The dark haired boy lay in his bed in the dormitory tower. The others slept on; they didn't have nightmares like he did. Their sleep was unmarred by the images of giant snakes chasing them, or another dark haired boy gloating because he'd taken advantage of a small, red haired girl, and made her do terrible things.

This night he couldn't sleep at all. Tomorrow he was going home to the Dursleys and how would he cope then. They didn't care whether he slept, or ate, or if he even existed. He threw off the covers and sat up. He reached over and drew back the red satin bed curtains. He heard Ron mumble something about spiders and phoenixes, and then he was silent again. Neville was snoring as usual, but the rest were silent.

He turned and lowered his bare feet to the floor, hissing at the cold that seeped up through the stone floor. He never understood why the floors at Hogwarts were always so cold. After all, it was a school for magic, surely there was some sort of spell to keep the floors a temperature that didn't freeze your toes. He also wondered for one insane second if the girl's dormitory had cold floors.

"I bet they don't," they could come into the boys dormitory, but the boys couldn't go into their rooms, now how was that fair? Not that he cared about what an eleven year old girl's room looked like; he just wanted to be able to do everything the girls could do.

He slipped his feet into his trainers and grabbed his red jumper. He pulled it over his head, and then he picked up his invisibility cloak. He stuffed it into a pocket and left the room, shutting the door behind him carefully. He went down the stairs into the quiet common room.

Moonlight invaded the room and turned it all silver and black like the after image of a camera flash. He stood at the bottom of the stairs for a minute, and mentally said goodbye to the common room at night. He slipped the invisibility cloak over his head and headed out the portrait hole.

The hallways were silent at this hour, but he kept an eye out for Mrs. Norris and Filch. He wondered if that man ever slept. It didn't seem to Harry that he did, after all every time in the last two years that he'd snuck out of bed, Filch was always stalking the halls with his cat, trying to catch students out of bed, as if it were his absolute mission in life.

He thought that Filch would be especially eager to catch someone in the halls that night, as it was the end of the term. Harry was sure he would want to dish out the last bit of punishment he could to the hapless students.

He reached his destination almost without conscious thought, climbing the stairs, passing niches in the walls where stubs of old burned out candles stood, the silvery moonlight guiding him to the top of the twisty staircase.

He came out at the top of the Astronomy Tower, and was seriously taken aback when he saw that he wasn't alone. Why was she up here? She shouldn't have been out of bed. He rationalized his own behavior as ok because he had the invisibility cloak. She was sitting in the middle of the floor looking up at the thousands of stars that twinkled in the black sky. Her red hair hung down around her shoulders, and he noticed that the moonlight made it glow like nothing he'd ever seen before.

She suddenly turned her head in his direction and he nearly fell back down the stairs. She was looking straight at him, and for a wild moment he really thought that she could see him standing there. Then the spell was broken, and she returned to her perusal of the stars above them.

The night was quiet, and the air was cool and pleasant. He wanted to take of the cloak and really feel it on his skin, but he didn't want to frighten her. He moved as slowly as he could to one side of her and sank to the stone floor. He watched her for what seemed to be hours, wondering why he felt compelled to stay.

She pointed a hand at the heavens and said. "Isn't it beautiful, Cassiopeia is so simple and yet so easy to find in the sky, she was the mythological queen of Ethiopia you know?"

Her face moved to the right and she said dreamily, "That's Orion the warrior, see how the stars form his belt, they are so bright. I wonder if there are planets around them, and if other people on them look up hoping to see us."

Harry was frozen to the spot he sat in. She seemed to be talking to herself. There was no one else there that he could see, and surely no one else in the school had an invisibility cloak, at least no one that she knew. Still, he couldn't resist looking up to where she pointed, and the stars from his Astronomy classes were all bright and visible that night.

He could see the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, or Ursa Major and Ursa Minor near the North Star. They were so clear they really did seem to resemble a large and a small bear in the sky. He'd never realized it before.

Ginny was speaking again, her eyes on the sky and her face full of concentration.

"Star light; Star bright, first start I see tonight.

Wish I may, wish I might, have this wish, I wish tonight."

She sat silent for a very long time, Harry was beginning to think he should reveal his presence to her, and make sure she got back to the dormitory alright, when she abruptly stood up and walked past him.

Softly, so softly, that if he hadn't been listening with every fiber of his being and if it hadn't been so quiet, he never would have heard her say it.

"Thank you, Harry for saving my life."

He sat dumbstruck till the sun began to rise, painting the early morning sky in gold, pinks, reds, and purple, till it was time to say goodbye to Hogwarts once again.


End file.
